We have worked through setting up Isilon’s OneFS Snapshots from the WebCLI in multiple Isilon Quick Tips. Let’s turn our focus now to setting up our snapshots from the CLI. Watch the video below and follow along while we use the CLI to create onetime snapshots and snapshot schedules.

Transcript – Creating Snapshots with Isilon’s OneFS from Command Line

Welcome back to another episode of Isilon Quick Tips. Today, we’re going to be talking about snapshots. We’ve covered snapshots in previous episodes, but everything we’ve done has always revolved around that web-cli.

Today, we’re going to go behind the scenes, and see what we can accomplish with snapshots, as far as creating and listing out different snapshots, all from the command line. Get ready to follow along by opening up your command prompt.

Once we’re logged in to the CLI, we can use your ISI-Snapshot snapshots list to list out all our snapshots. You can see your ID, name, and path here. What if we want to get some more details on this? We can use the ISI-Snapshot snapshots view, and we’re going to pull in that specific ID, so the ID I want to pull is number two, which corresponds to the nasa-snaps. When we run that command, what we can look at, or we can see that ID, but we can also see the path, so we know that it’s on the IFS NASA directory. We can see when it expires. We can also see the size and some other information, too. Let’s create a one-time snap using the command line.

To do that, what we’re going to do is, we’re going to use our ISI-Snapshot snapshots create command. What we’re going to do with that is, we’re going to pick a path. We’ve already got a snapshot schedule set up for the NASA directory, but what I want to do is, I want to set one up for the videos directory. I’m going to put the absolute path, and so that’s the ifs/videos. Then, we’ll also pass in our name. The name I’m going to use is the video-snaps.

That complete, let’s list out our snapshots and see if our one-time snap was taken. Remember, that’s ISI-Snapshot snapshots list, so we take out that S.

That was how we take a one-time snap. What happens when we want to set a schedule up for our snapshots? Before we set up that snapshot schedule, I want to reference the CLI guide. In the CLI guide, here, you can see a table with all these different percentage and letters. I’m going to reference these are we’re creating that snapshot schedule. These are going to be a way for us to be able to name how we want to show the time-date stamp on our snapshot schedules.

Our snapshot schedule we’re going to create is going to be for the ifs/videos directory, but we want to set a schedule instead of just a one-time snap. We’re going to use the ISI-Snapshot schedules create, going to pass in our name, so video-snaps, going to keep that as the name for this one. We’re going to do it ifs/videos, that’s our directory.

Now, we’re going to pass in video-%c, and that’s going to give us the year, month, day of the week, hour, minute, and second, for each time the snap is taken. The %c is what I was talking about, use the table that we had just looked at to be able to pass that in. Now, we’re going to select every day, every hour. I want a snap every day, of every hour. The last parameter we’re going to pass in is going to be the duration. That duration is going to be when we want it to expire.

I’m going to let these snaps be okay for a year. They’re going to roll off in a FIFO fashion every year. We can create that schedule, and we want to view it. To view it, we’re going to use the isi snapshot schedules list. You can see we have two schedules here. The video snap that we just created, and one we previously had for our Nasa Snapshots.

Now, let’s view the details. isi snapshot schedules view, and then the ID number, so 3. Now, we can see we have an ID number of 3. That’s our absolute path, and we have that snapshot schedule happening every day, of every hour, and the duration is for one year. We didn’t specify an alias. We can see when it’s going to run next. That’s how you view snapshots from the command line, how you create one-time snaps, and even set up snapshot schedules, all from the command line. Make sure that you subscribe, so that you never miss an episode of Isilon Quick Tips, or more videos are big data and Hadoop.

Isilon’s OneFS offers Access Zones to divide different workflows/users/AD servers/ GroupNets/etc. in the same Isilon Cluster.

Learn to setup Access Zones in Isilon’s OneFS. Access Zones allow for administrators to partition the Isilon clusters into different virtual containers. In this episode of Isilon Quick Tips we will walk through setting up Access Zones from the OneFS WebCLI.

Video

Transcript

Hi folks, Thomas Henson here with thomashenson.com. And today we’re going to step into another episode of Isilon Quick Tips. We’re going to learn all we need to know about Access Zones and how to set up Access Zones through the Web CLI and OneFS. So, find out more right after this.

So, the first thing we want to do is we want to log into OneFS. Once we’re logged into OneFS on the Web CLI, let’s go to the file system and our File Explorer, and look at some of the data that we already have in our cluster. And so, you can see that we have an Access Zone here, and our current Access Zone is the system, and that’s the only Access Zone that I have. And our data that’s in our IFS Directory, you can see that we have our home data, we have some HDFS data, and we also have a dataset called Datasets.

Let’s say that we wanted to partition out that data, we wanted to have one Access Zone in IFS for our system and all our system information. And then the next thing we wanted to have is we wanted to have that dataset and have it separate. Maybe we want to have our own active directory for it, maybe there’s just a need for us to partition that data out. So, let’s go ahead and set up a different Access Zone just for that data. And so, to do that, we’ll go to our Access-Access Zones. You can see that in our Access Zones here, we only have our system just like we just like we saw. So, now we’re going to create that Access Zone. Remember, we’re doing this for our datasets, so we’ll keep the name at datasets.

And then now we want to choose that path, and so one thing to keep in mind when we’re creating these Access Zones and choosing our paths is we want to make sure that we’re not overlapping our directories. So, for instance, if we wanted to create an archive Access Zone from our NASA Directory, we still wouldn’t want to have that NASA Directory in another Access Zone as well, that would create an overlapping one. So, let’s just stick with our datasets. And then you can see that we have our GroupNet. And so, for our IP Addresses, I’m going to keep with the GroupNet that we have. If you wanted to create a different set of IP Addresses for access, you’re more than able to do that. And then you create your Authentication Providers, and we’re ready to create that Access Zone.

And now you can see that we have two Access Zones, so we have our system and we also have our dataset. Let’s go back to look at our File Explorer. Now you can see that we have a current Access Zone of System, where all of our IFS Directory is, so nothing’s changed here. Now let’s look at our datasets. In our datasets, we have that dataset directory. And so, now we have two Access Zones, but let’s go look at our protocols.

Once we’re in our protocols, we’re under the System Access Zone, so we’re paying attention to what Access Zone we’re in. We have our IFS default, and then we also have our NASA share. So, when we go to our dataset Access Zone, we don’t have our dataset file share. And so, what we can do is we’ll need to create that SMB Share, and so keeping it simple here, we’re going to keep it as dataset. So, our name is datasets, and then a small description here. Then we’ll want to keep that path at datasets. Add any users or groups, we’re going to keep it default. And our share’s created.

And so, you can see how quick and easy it was to create an Access Zone. Just remember some of the tips that we talked about whenever you’re creating those Access Zones. You don’t want to have them if there overlapping. Now, OneFS will check for you and give you an error message if you have it and allow for you to do that, but you don’t want to do it. And then second, if you’re creating those Access Zones, remember that you want to add maybe a different Authentication Provider, you can do that, or a different set of IP addresses. Just make sure you have those IPs set before you create that Access Zone, so you can allocate those there.

Thanks, and make sure to stay tuned and subscribe to this video, so you see more Isilon Quick Tips.

How to Compare Snapshots in OneFS

At least once every Isilon Administrator will need to compare snapshots in OneFS. It might be a situation where a user has upload files to the wrong directory or you need to roll back to a different version of a directory. Whatever the case OneFS has the ability to compare snapshots from the CLI>

In this episode of Isilon Quick tips I will walk through using the CLI to view and compare snapshots in OneFS. Watch this video and learn how!

Transcript

(forgive any errors it was transcribed by a machine)

Hi and welcome back to another episode of Isilon quick tips! Today we’re going to talk about how to compare some snapshot images all from the CLI find out more right after this.

In this episode what we want to do is we want to look at some snapshots and see how we can compare these snapshots. So you can see here from the Web CLI I have a lot of snapshots but if I wanted to compare them how can I do that? Look do all that from the command line so SSH back into our cluster.

The first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to list out all of our snapshots you can see that all of our snapshots are here so all my snapshots are on this ifs NASA directory and you see that I have an ID here that specifies each one and then also I have a default name here for the snapshot schedule name and so if we wanted to compare a couple of these so what is the difference between our first snapshot so ID two and let’s just say that we wanted to compare it with ID 20 what would be the difference between those two and so there’s a way that we can actually compare that the first thing we want to do is let’s just look and see what information is available if we just view that individual ID number so we can use our easy snapshot snapshots view and then just put in the ID number you can also put in the name but I have a default name that’s very long so it’s just easier for me with managing the smaller data set to just use that ID number so let’s see what information is available here and so it gives us our path and our name it’s also going to tell us how much space is holding up and when the snapshot was created if it’s law or if it’s going to expire but there’s not a lot of information in telling us what’s actually in it right because it’s just a snapshot of a point in time and so how do we compare this so we want to take our snapshot ID number two and let’s compare it to number 20 and see what data has changed and so to do that we’ll be using a change list modification but to do that we’ll have to kick off a job to start it so I’m going to clear out the screen and let’s type in our easy job and so what we’ll do is we’ll do an easy job jobs start and we’re going to create a change list and so that’s changed list we’re going to put in the old snap ID so the old snap ID was two and we’re going to compare it with our newer snap and so the newer snap ID was 20 so we started the job and so if we wanted to go out and list it out let’s go ahead and view our change list so we use easy change list modification and we’ll just use L to list out all our change lists we have a change list here for to underscore 20 and so this is going to be the change list that we just created that’s comparing ID 2 and ID 20 sometimes you’ll get an in progress at the end and that’s just because the job is still processing and so you can’t view it just yet so just come back and check in a few different times but it looks like our jobs complete here so we can view those so to view it we’re just going to use – a instead of L and that ID number so to underscore 20 so easy change list mod – a to underscore 20 so we have a lot of information that’s compared in this change modification between snapshot 2 and snapshot 20 one of the big things is we have two files that were created here that I was looking for so this is NASA I uploaded a facility’s CSV then I also uploaded a report CSV and so you can see some of the timestamps or some of the other information but if you’re looking at this information you’re saying man this it’s kind of hard to look at what’s really the objective here well this is a way that we can look and look at this change modification date from the CLI but for the most part this is really used by some other applications order through the Isilon onefs api to be able to pull that information out so if you’re looking to write some kind of process that’s going to look and compare these changes to move some of the backups then you would use this so the best way to look and see what all these different CLI flags and some of these path names are is to go back and look at the Isilon documentation so if you look at the Isilon documentation you can see what all these flags mean here so that if you’re writing some kind of code or some kind of application that’s using the API to kind of do a backup process or something like that then you can use this information here but if you’re just looking quickly on how you want to see what changes happen between two different snapshots you can definitely just use this and pull out some information like I said the biggest thing for me is I wanted to see the different path names so I wanted to see were there any files that are different in snapshot two versus snapshot twenty and we’re able to see that here be sure to subscribe so that you never miss an episode of Isilon quick tips and see you next time [Music]